"He was very helpful," the Rev. Nichols says of Praul, a carpenter by trade. "He did good work. He rebuilt a cabinet in the church.

"But, honestly, I had somewhat of a dis-ease with him."

Nichols isn't certain how or where Freeman and Praul hooked up as boyfriend and girlfriend, except to say that it wasn't at the church.

"Homeless people around here go to the same places," she says.

"Homeless women," the pastor adds, "often make bad choices, especially when they meet a man who looks like somebody who can protect them."

The street romance was brief.

"She only knew him for two weeks, if that," says Angel Dunlap, Freeman's daughter, as friends and members of the On-Site Ministry mingle following a prayer vigil Thursday afternoon in a vacant lot near the sidewalk spot where Freeman collapsed.

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Dunlap had never met Praul. She got a glimpse of her mother's accused murderer while sitting in the courtroom earlier this week for a pretrial hearing.

"The picture I got was he was going to try to fight (the case)," Dunlap says.

"For him to kill her and not even know her that long," she adds, "the whole thing is senseless. I want him to pay for what he did to my mom."

The vegetables and flowers growing in Rick's Garden are thick, plentiful and alive with the memory of Rick Lechtanski, a neighborhood resident who was murdered in 1995.

In 1998, his brother Robb used a jackhammer to convert an asphalt and concrete patch between the Broadway parking lot and the Broadway church building into green space.

Rick's Garden is now filled with beans, collards, an assortment of vegetables and "mint, mint mint ... and enough oregano to make an Italian restaurant very happy," Nichols says.

The garden also has a fresh memorial.

A cross decorated with flowers includes a picture of Christine Freeman, smiling without a hint of homelessness or grief.

"She was an imp, mischievous, with a glisten in her eye," Nichols says, looking down on the makeshift garden memorial.